My attention was first drawn to Mrs. Goldstein when I overheard her telling her grandchildren that had she not been sheltered by a Christian family in the Netherlands, she would have suffered the exact same fate as all of the corpses in the display about the Anne Frank and the extermination of the rest of Jews in the Netherlands during the war. Mrs. Goldstein must have recognized the surprised look on my face because it almost seemed as though she had read my mind. She looked right at me and said, "Yes, it's true…I was there." She asked me whether I was surprised to learn that anybody who actually experienced the Holocaust was still alive and I admitted that I was surprised. She said that she was 80 years old and that she was only 14 when the Nazis began transporting all of the remaining Jews in the Netherlands to the death camps.
Mrs. Goldstein explained that she was originally from Germany and that she and her family had managed to escape Nazi Germany in 1939 aboard a ship called the MS St. Louis. After two weeks at sea, they arrived to the shores of Cuba and Florida but the authorities refused to permit the ship to enter any port. They were eventually escorted back out to sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. Most of the Jewish German refugees were eventually allowed to enter Belgium, France, and the Netherlands....
However, nearly all of them were later killed by the Nazis after all of those countries were occupied. Mrs. Goldstein and her family ended up in Amsterdam. She told us the story of how she and her younger brother hid under the floorboards beneath their toilet when the Nazis came to their home. Her parents and older brother had no time to hide and were taken away at gunpoint; it was the last time she ever saw any of them. She described being sheltered by a Christian family who risked their own lives to help them escape and then allowed them to live in their grain cellar for the rest of the war.
Until that day at the museum, the Holocaust seemed to me to be such a distant historical event that I failed to really understand most of what I had learned about the subject in school. The experience of actually meeting a survivor who so narrowly escaped being one of the six million and listening to her describe the experience of listening to her parents and brother being marched out of their home to be killed by the Nazis was much more of an education on the topic than all of the reading and memorizing I had done for school. It taught me that there is a tremendous difference between studying and understanding and that just because events may have not occurred in my lifetime should not make them less significant or real to me.
